Sustainability Leader; Principal, Beth Beloff & Associates
President, BRIDGES to Sustainability Institute
Ms Beloff is Founder and Principal of Beth Beloff & Associates, a premier sustainability consulting company specializing in developing sustainability strategies, assessment methodologies, and sustainability metrics. She is project director of all projects conducted through BB&A. She is also President of a well-known sustainability non-profit organization, BRIDGES to Sustainability Institute (formerly BRIDGES to Sustainability), which she founded in 1997. For over ten years, BRIDGES has developed innovative approaches to support decision making with respect to sustainability. In 2005, Golder Associates acquired the intellectual property of BRIDGES to Sustainability, and invited its team to join the firm. For three years Beth developed and directed the US sustainability practice of Golder Associates, while refreshing the vision of BRIDGES to Sustainability Institute.
Ms. Beloff has spent over 20 years as a thought leader in formulating the concept and practice of sustainable development. She is an expert in integrating sustainable development with other critical organizational aspects and, in particular, in how to measure sustainability performance. She has experience dating back to the early 90s in providing thought leadership to government agencies and industry on sustainability issues, planning and performance assessment, and in the development of a number of well-respected industry consortia organized around the sharing of sustainability best practices. Her work includes development of decision support frameworks and tools, including key methods to develop sustainability metrics, industry-based sustainability indexes, roadmaps for inclusion of sustainability considerations across a business organization, and sustainability assessments of full costs and benefits of alternative decisions. These include: collaboration with the Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI) on the development of the GEMI Metrics Navigator™, a strategic sustainability metrics development process which is often used as a sustainability assessment process; development of the software, BRIDGESworks Metrics™, an eco-efficiency and lifecycle tool to improve environmental performance of products and processes, which was applied to Stanley Works for the development of operational metrics; development of a sustainability screen for evaluating new products and processes under development in R&D for Caterpillar Inc; development of a sustainability-related full cost-benefit assessment tool for evaluating alternative projects for the Port of Houston Authority resulting in non-traditional and more holistic ROI analyses; development of the AIChE Sustainability Index™ - a benchmarking of sustainability performance for chemical companies - for the Institute for Sustainability of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). Ms. Beloff was the leader in developing the Sustainability Guide – a practical guidance for evaluating sustainability across business functions and value chain stages - for the Center for Sustainable Technology Practices (CSTP), the industry group of AIChE. Ms. Beloff was a team leader for a LifeCycle Management Strategy Development effort for a major heavy equipment manufacturer. Additionally, she was on the team to develop Green Indicators and Metrics for the City of Toronto, and she will be part of a team to develop sustainability metrics for the City of Houston.
Prior to BRIDGES, Beth founded and directed the Institute for Corporate Environmental Management (ICEM) in the business school at the University of Houston. ICEM developed executive development seminars and workshops on various issues of importance around how business could best integrate environmental issues into its business strategies. Her team received a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to develop environmental cost accounting approaches in order to reveal to companies the full cost of their environmental impacts. The result of some of that work was published in “Green Ledgers” by WRI in the mid-90s.
She currently chairs a sustainability collaborative roundtable group of major chemical companies and their suppliers, and chairs a GHG measurement effort through the Founders Society (representing all of the engineering societies). She is also chairman of the board of the non-profit Sustainable Travel International. For a client, The Tagos Group, she led the effort to build the Green Supply Chain Scorecard methodology, which includes more broadly the assessment of sustainability practices of suppliers and green attributes of products. She further developed that supplier scorecard effort into a more robust sustainable supplier assessment methodology. She has given hundreds of speeches on corporate sustainability to audiences around the world and has authored over 30 publications on sustainability, including Transforming Sustainability Strategy into Action: the Chemical Industry, published by Wiley-InterScience in 2005, in which she is principal author and editor. She is contributing chapters to two books that are forthcoming on corporate sustainability and developing strategic sustainability metrics. Beth has a BA degree from University of California at Berkeley, a master of architecture degree from UCLA, and an MBA from the University of Houston.
